A giant star in deep space is obscured by dust

A huge star 300,000 times brighter than the Sun is nearing the end of its life and shrouding itself with dust, according to new data from the Hubble Space Telescope. WHY IT MATTERS: Learning

more about this star — named VY Canis Majoris — will help astronomers piece together how stars much larger than the Sun evolve and behave at the ends of their stellar lives. WHAT THEY

FOUND: Scientists using the Hubble found the red hypergiant star is actually shooting out gas and dust, making it look dimmer from the telescope's perspective. * "VY Canis Majoris

may be in a unique evolutionary state that separates it from the other stars. It's probably this active over a very short period, maybe only a few thousand years. We're not going

to see many of those around," astrophysicist Roberta Humphreys, who led a new study about the star in _The Astronomical Journal_, said in a statement. * Scientists expect the star will

either one day explode as a supernova or collapse into a black hole. THE INTRIGUE: The star is behaving a lot like another huge, famous star — Betelgeuse. * Researchers were keeping an eye

on Betelgeuse last year when it appeared to dim far more than expected, stoking excitement that it might be heading for its own supernova explosion. * But later research found the star was

actually being obscured by dust, causing the apparent dimming. * "The origin of these high mass-loss episodes in both VY Canis Majoris and Betelgeuse is probably caused by large-scale

surface activity, large convective cells like on the Sun," Humphreys said, referencing features of a star's surface created by the cooling and heating of plasma. "But on VY

Canis Majoris, the cells may be as large as the whole Sun or larger."